Aaron Weir Kelstone
Words: 366
[Essay]

I went to see the X-MEN film recently and was reminded of something that happened a long time ago. It began innocently enough. Little did we know that it would change us irrevocably.

It began by being trapped for hours and hours in a confining room with someone we hardly knew. Some humiliating things were done to us in that room all directed towards the goal of painfully trying to get us to say things perfectly clear. And then one day there was this indescribable moment when the therapist yells "THAT!" We didn't know what "THAT" was or if we could even repeat "THAT" again.

"THAT" was the catalyst of our mutation. We all became the Poster Children. For hours and hours we would be drilled to sing God Bless America or speak the Pledge of Allegiance. Once they were satisfied with "THAT" they would drag us out into the world and proudly demonstrate that educating the deaf was working spectacularly well!

One such demonstration involved the state legislature. There we had to sign and speak the Pledge of Allegiance. Each of us enunciating painfully and awkwardly each word: "I pledge allegiance to the flag . . . one nation under God . . . invisible." "Invisible" because we didn't understand the word "indivisible." You may think that was an error, but was it really a mistake? Maybe we got it right the first time and subconsciously knew we were invisible. When they stood up after the performance and cheered, I believe they never really saw us as deaf. They just witnessed another miracle by the Poster Children proving that any disability can be fixed.

Later some of us would try to stop, to meld back into our world, to rejoin other deaf people. But it was too late . . . we had mutated. Deaf culture spit us out because we were no longer deaf enough and hearing people spit us out because we were not fixed enough. We had changed and no one cared that we couldn't get home again. We didn't know that this would make us alone and ultimately invisible. We mutated but never became the subject of a comic book series.

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Aaron Weir Kelstone is the author of 25 Cents: An One-Act Play. He teaches in the Department of Cultural and Creative Studies at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.